Meerkat Map uses app’s API to show streams around the world

If you’re a fan of streaming app Meerkat, then you know it’s a little hard to look at where in the world other people are streaming. That has now changed with the Meerkat Map, a global view that shows you where people are streaming, so you can hop in and peek at a world different from yours.

The app, which is hosted on Github, takes advantage of Meerkat’s API, which the company released in May. It’s very similar to the Global List already available in Meerkat’s competitor, Periscope: it groups streams in aggregate, so you can see from a zoomed out view how many are streaming in that area. But Meerkat Map actually breaks down further when you zoom in, so you could narrow down to the city level where streams are coming from. Which is either neat or completely creepy, depending on how you look at it.

From my experience, Meerkat Map works very well on both mobile and desktop, without any weird fiddling around.

Meerkat is a small team that lacks Periscope’s support from Twitter, so an enthusiastic community building useful tools is the best way for the startup to explore new ideas and features. I would like to see the global map directly integrated into Meerkat itself — or at least a way to plug in great third-party apps to help build out my experience. But this is a good first step.